The Holocaust and Collective Memory [Paperback]

An excellent book also available as "The Holocaust in American Life". Different title but same text.

Novick skilfully, tactfully, and diplomatically lances a great deal of the anger and ire that Holocaust issues have created. He enlightens us by exhibiting the cultural change that has swept American society - from one of All-American hero culture - the stand-alone, ruggedly independent, uncomplaining, right-stuff hero - to the voluble anti-hero - whining, and complaining - the victim. But don't get him wrong - the Jews were victims of the most terrible atrocities - but Novick illustrates how the moral advantage that goes with being such a victim has been used by many whose projects were varied - both good and bad - to the greater or lesser good of Holocaust memory. His most telling analysis, and his keenest insight is, perhaps, when he dissects the use of the phrase "No More! Never Again!" as promulgated by many a museum, and Holocaust writer. Realpolitik, he states, seems to demand that Never Again means "Never shall one, vote-losing death, be expended in an effort to intervene in someone else's problem!" And this is the sad status of affairs - with genocide after genocide occurring since 1944 and the liberation of the camps - there has never been one, large-scale, and comprehensive military campaign to prevent a pending, or an actual, genocide (save for the (ambiguities) of Kosovo). We calculate how many deaths is it acceptable to sustain in stopping mass-killing - an almost implausible consideration! The age of sacrifice is over: we live in a time when a man that lays down his life for another - so that the other might have life - this is regarded as a disaster in terms of votes back home! The age of sacrifice is gone. Or so it would seem. Real heroism - real sacrifice - has given way to victim-culture: moral advantage accrues to the victim, and this energy, the political-will it so generates, is deemed attractive, and necessary, by so many focus-groups, lobbyists, caucuses etc. to push their projects to the top of the pile. And whether this is good or not, for the Holocaust, Novick considers.

Novick explodes the myth that "my suffering is so great, that your suffering pales into insignificance as a result!" He cannot endure the sheer condescension that such trite comparisons produce. He refuses the notion of "competitive victimhood" (my phrase) in order to garner to oneself a moral advantage in order to propel one's claims to the top of the agenda, to generate a force of pressure that gains attention, and action, to move a particular cause forward. He illustrates with many examples of competing political claims surrounding the Jewish Race after the Holocaust, and competing understandings of what the Holocaust was about - ranging from being beyond explanation (a mystical approach), to being retribution and punishment (by God) for failure by the Jews. Novick himself does not propose just what he made of the Holocaust. In fact, personal interjection is held to a minimum, if it appears at all...

There are lots of books about the holocaust but this one takes a novel angle, and challenges some commonly held preconceptions about how the holocaust has been remembered in the United States.

The holocaust features prominently in official mainstream US and American culture. That much is obvious. Wasn't it always so, at least since 1945? The answer -extraordinarily - is that it wasn't. In the late 40s, through the 50s and up until the 1967 Six-Day War, the holocaust was something American Jews were ashamed of, something about which hardly anything was spoken, not in public at any rate. The 1967 war changed all that, and the holocaust has moved from the periphery to the centre of American and Jewish life, in both Israel and the United States.

There were a variety of reasons for this change. Before 1967, American Jews opted to fit into mainstream US values. In foreign policy, this meant acquiescing in German rearmament and the reintegration of that country into the anti-Soviet alliance. American Jews tolerated the rehabilitation of Nazi-era bureaucrats and the offer of sanctuary to Nazi war criminals in the United States. Quiescence extended even to American Middle East policy: when Eisenhower forced Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai in 1956, American Jews demurred (can you imagine such a thing happening now?).

The apotheosis of American ideals of integration and social mobility in the late 1940s/1950s meant that American Jews played down the holocaust, with its connotations of victimhood, of passive victims going like lambs to the slaughter (a parallel process operated in Israel, too). Among American gentiles and Jews alike, the holocaust was cast as a crime of `totalitarianism', a subset of a gamut of Nazi crimes against the various peoples of Europe, and not THE defining crime of Nazism, with Jews taking the centre-stage in a pantheon of victims.

Nineteen Sixty-Seven was the threshold year, when the holocaust began to move from the periphery to the centre of American-Jewish consciousness. This partially reflected changes in American society: the integrationist ideals of the 1950s falling away with the rise of ethnic and group politics, with victimhood becoming something to be proud, not ashamed of. And what better badge of victimhood was there then the holocaust? Anti-Semitism was no longer just as a form of racism but a primordial pathology from which Jews could never be safe anywhere, not even in the United States. If this was the case, then it followed that Israel was a safe haven. Added to this, the fact that US policy makers came to see Israel as an indispensable ally and proxy in the Cold War, made Jewish lobbying for the country seem like an act of loyalty to American priorities, rather than ethnic special pleading for a foreign country. This was despite the almost total disappearance of anti-Semitism as a force in American life and the abolition of barriers to Jewish advance, processes which accelerated and deepened after 1967.

As we move into recent times, Novick offers an extended reflection of the `lessons' the holocaust supposedly offers us. He doubts whether the holocaust, as an extreme event, offers anything much in way of guidance as to how people in rich, peaceful societies should act. The so-called bystander problem - the supposed indifference on the part of the gentiles to the extermination of their Jewish neighbours - is easy to explain: most people were and are not heroes. In Nazi-occupied Europe, they kept their heads down, a rational if not exactly exalted response, but a perfectly understandable and comprehensible reaction nonetheless. In our own lives, we keep our heads down and our mouths shut, when faced with lesser injustices in our own societies, even when the penalty does not entail consignment to a concentration camp or a firing squad.

It seems then that, for Novick, the endless hyping of the lessons of the holocaust ends up refracted among the myriad of political and moral persuasions of those to whom the lessons are supposed to apply. People of different persuasions in other words come away from their encounters with the various representations of the holocaust in literature, film and museums with their minds already having been made up beforehand as to what lessons the holocaust can teach us.

This book is frequently bracketed with Norman Finkelstein's `The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish suffering. But their focus is very different. Finkelstein's work is a paint-blistering examination of the political misuses of the holocaust while Novick's is a cooler, sceptical account of the supposed lessons the holocaust has to teach us. However both men cover the same ground in their examination of the different way American Jews have come to see the holocaust before and after 1967. In this respect, Novick's work is superior, but Finkelstein hits home with greater power, documenting actual examples of the abuse of history he writes about and does not pull his punches, which Novick sometimes does. Both books can be read together with profit for those interested in this subject.

Ultimately what Novick succeeds in doing is to make a distinction between studying the holocaust as a historical occurrence and using it to draw `lessons' in the sense of pontificating and moralizing, from already established political and moral convictions, about the `relevance' of the holocaust to your own particular cause. Even if you disagree with his pessimism, it's worth reading this book in order for one to spot, and understand, the difference.